Tag: social networking

About a month ago, John Nemo sent me a message in LinkedIn asking if I would like a review copy of his new book, Linkedin Riches: How I made $135,000 in just 90 Days using LinkedIn!”

I was wary at first because of the subtitle, which made it sound like the get-rich-quick stuff of infomercials, but I overcame that initial reaction and requested a Kindle copy.

I’m glad I did. And I’m glad that somewhere through the process, John decided to take his own advice in the naming of his book. More on that in a bit.

Because of the patient-oriented nature of my day job, I have focused much more on general consumer platforms like Facebook instead of LinkedIn. Our Human Resources department has used LinkedIn successfully for recruiting. But since the audiences I have been pursuing are mostly patients and consumers, as opposed to “B2B” as they say in the biz, I have had a profile, but haven’t spent much time personally in LinkedIn. So it was good to get perspective from someone who has.

One of the main points John makes is that your LinkedIn profile should be client-facing and framed in terms of what you can do for clients. It’s not about you. And he also gives some concrete suggestions for how to implement this philosophy.

So here’s how I used his advice on my own LinkedIn profile.

Rewriting My Profile Headline:

Before:

After:

Giving Descriptive Titles to Web Links in Contact Info

Improving My Summary:

Before:

After:

Those are three positive changes in my profile in just the first chapter. The combination of the client-facing mindset and some practical tips makes this a good resource.

Practicing What He Preaches

As his book is now published, it was good to see that John retitled it to follow his own client-facing advice. You will remember that the previous subtitle was all about him: “How I made $135,000 in Just 90 Days Using LinkedIn!”

While that might appeal to some, the new title is much more oriented toward benefits for the reader.

BuddyPress is plug-in for WordPress blogs that enables social networking.

You will see some changes here on SMUG as I experiment with the BuddyPress functionality. For instance, you will now see tabs for Activity, Members, Groups and Forums. And yes, I realize that the tab structure is a little out-of-whack, but I’m working on that.

BuddyPress seems it could be a powerful, customizable community solution, whereas the SMUG group in Facebook is limited and can’t be changed.

Please take a few moments to sign up for an account by clicking the Sign Up link in the top banner. Then you can learn along with me.

Facebook Groups are a great way to gather people with a common interest, and have a common space for them to interact.

There are three basic kinds of groups in Facebook:

Open Groups – Anyone can join these, and they can form on a whim. In fact, as you are categorizing you group, one of the choices in the drop-down menu is “Just for fun – Totally Pointless.” Later in the curriculum (Facebook 120) I will show you just how easy it is to create a group. That doesn’t mean it will have any members, but starting the group is simple. And of course if you’re a SMUGgle you really should join the SMUG Facebook group.

Closed Groups – A limited portion of these groups can be seen by non-members, and they can request to join, but group administrators have to invite new members or approve those requesting access. This, for example, was the group type we used to share video and photos of my new granddaughter, Evelyn Grace. So if you want a moderate level of privacy, a closed group is a good option.

Secret Groups – These are quite private, and are not displayed on any of their members’ profiles. As I said here, don’t store bank account numbers or nuclear launch codes in a secret group, but for a fairly secure way of interacting with a defined group of Facebook users, a secret group can work. These are a little harder to form, in that you have to invite Facebook friends; they can’t request to join because they won’t be able to even have access to make the request. A good way around this is to form the group as closed, but then change it to secret once everyone has joined.

Members of groups don’t need to be “friends” in Facebook, so a group can be a way of allowing people with a common interest to interact. So I established Facebook groups for my daughter’s basketball team last year and her volleyball team this year. We’ll do this again for basketball season. So we can share links to news stories and upload video and photos, all without a bunch of high school students needing to be my “friends.”

If the people who are part of your “target population” are already in Facebook, a group can be a great way to bring them together, as we did for this Mayo Clinic Career Festival group, where we added about 350 members in a single day.

If you’re forming a group entirely made up of people from your workplace, a Yammer Group is a much better option than a Facebook group. But if you need to mix people from your workplace with others outside your company, a Facebook group can be a good solution.

I first saw this news in my WordPress dashboard as I was writing a post last night, and went to install the WordPress application, which is supposed to display the most recent posts from my blog. Note: it didn’t work in my Safari browser, but it did in Firefox and IE. Hopefully either the WordPress gang or LinkedIn are listening like Yammer and will figure out and fix the Safari problem.

Here’s what it looks like when you add the WordPress application:

All you do is paste in your URL, and hit “Save”

And the widget (which you can drag toward the top of your LinkedIn profile) looks like what you see above. Another great reason to have a WordPress blog, huh?

It’s important because by opening the platform as Facebook did, LinkedIn is saying “we don’t have all the smartest programmers in the world, and we sure can’t afford to pay them. So we will provide an opportunity for others to enhance the usefulness of our site, and connect their sites and services to ours.”

Jeremiah’s point is similar: many (if not most) corporate intranets are missing the consumer-grade social networking features users have come to expect on the Internet. (Isn’t it funny that consumer-grade means higher quality on the Internet, while “business” or “professional” grade is clunkier? But that’s a topic for another post.)

Especially in today’s economic climate, corporate IT departments aren’t going to be able to afford hiring enough programmers to recreate that same level of social networking funtionality (or to put it another way, to “reinvent the wheel.”)

Open source (like WordPress) and Software as a Service (Saas – like Yammer or Salesforce.com) solutions will be smart ways for organizations to get world-class user experience for employees at significantly lower costs.

If someone else has already developed and polished a fantastic user experience, and if you can get it for free or at an extremely reasonable cost, why wouldn’t you take advantage of it? Why not deploy your programmers to create the links and safeguards that tie these world-class applications together?

Jeremiah thinks his yet-to-be-born kids won’t have any concept of a corporate intranet. I’m not so sure about that, but I’m casting my vote with him. He’s a Forrester analyst, after all. (You can cast YOUR vote below!)

But certainly there are some data elements and resources that your corporate IT department is currently paying boatloads to store and back up, that you could instead have outside your firewall. My blog, for example, is out on the Internet for all to see anyway. And Flickr photo streams or other resources could be “cloudsourced,” which would have the benefit of creating more links to your corporate or professional sites.

The LinkedIn announcement suggests that it could be the major hub for integrating this information. And as more applications are developed and security is proven (and as the economic climate puts more pressure on corporate IT to deliver more services for less), even more highly confidential data could be integrated in a hub like LinkedIn.

What do you think? Is Jeremiah right? (No, not Jeremiah Wright…that’s again another topic.)

Cast your vote below, and add your thoughts about this topic in the comments!